Saturday, April 17, 2004

what moms talk about

I have been thinking a lot about that Time article on blogging, the one that said "mothers are the future of blogging."

I like that statement a lot. But I also think that it is easily oversimplified, like many things related to moms. The article suggested that technical savvy moms are now keeping cute little baby blogs instead of the ancient baby books of old.

From reading the article I somehow imagined that America still mostly sees moms as bleary-eyed zombies who feel compelled to record bowel movements with the intensity of a delusional celebrity fanatic.
But I think us moms and pops on the internet know the real story.

Yes, there are some who use blogs in the first year of their baby's lives to track important milestones or to just brag about how darn adorable their babies are (hey I once had newborns, and I thought they were the cutest things in the universe too).

But blogs allow moms and pops to really express the day-to-day complexity of parenthood in a way that we never could before. We have an audience that understands that one minute we can be in a crappy mood, wishing to escape the prison that is our life and the next minute we can be giggling with glee over the most mundane detail of life (like the baby slept through the night or the delivery man delivered the shed when he promised, instead of screwing up our day by being delayed three hours).

In blogs, we can easily comment on the world around us, join in on the jokes making the rounds, and laugh at ourselves even as we gain from the experience of outing our failures. Blogging allows parents to connect across the globe and to feel a bit less isolated and alone. And mostly, it gives us an opportunity to be opinionated and vocal -- to feel as if we exist and aren't invisible.

I also laugh when I imagine the corporate minds of America that read the recent Time article and begin to think, "Hmmm, now soccer moms with SUV's are so bored that they all have blogs as if it is the newest handbag. How can we use that to our strategic mass marketing advantage?"

I laugh because I think the corporate mind of America would be surprised -- no shocked -- to learn that a lot of the down home moms who blog talk dirtier and with more honesty than anything that the chicks on Sex and the City ever did. Not that these blogs try necessarily to shock. It's just shocking and refreshing to hear moms talking about sex as if it is a normal part of life. And it's shocking and refreshing to hear parents talk about relationship struggles, dealing with stress or depression, or owning up to the messy things in life.

This stuff is so much more compelling than Reality TV and so much REALER -- if that's a word.
So moms and pops keep writing with your potty mouths and sharing your F.I.L.T.H. (yes, Liz, I mean you) and I'll keep laughing along.

And someday, in about ten years, the rest of America will probably catch on to the fact that we rock. And then we'll have some respect.

I started out with the idea of blogging about soo mundane things, but the really important things I wanted to express were rated R+, so I got a new anonymous blog. We blog about things that we're too uptight to talk about.

I really enjoyed this post and look forwad to hearing more. I've been following Jay around... haha... just kidding, actually I've followed some of the links he's posted on his and kitti's blog. I have been blogging for two years now, originally starting out as a way to communicate with a couple of old high school friends that took the high road and went into college. As for myself I chose to settle down, marry and have a family, feeling that I would pursue an education and a career later in life. One day recently while "blog-hopping" I ran into a blog that interested me, a man who met his wife on-line. Well that's how hubby and I met and we are 8 years in the making now, six of them married, with three children under 4. I'm 24 years old and I'm not going to be some zombified soccer mom that never has sex with her husband. I discovered a whole network of blogs regarding sex, marriage, child rearing, and the whole bit of honesty and intensity with which these people write opened the flood gates for me. It has been a compelling means of working out issues a little on my own first in order to better communicate with my husband, and it has helped me connect to see that I'm no alone. I tried this with the message boards on some of the baby sites, but found them to be nothing bu a huge unproductive bitch fest involving some of those "zombified" mother personified women. Anyway, I do think corporate America would be shocked at the down to earth nitty gritty stories that you would find, but hey, that's the bloggers secret.